Why Are Links So Important?

At the dawn of Internet search, search engines such as Yahoo! and
Excite used to rank sites in a wonderfully archaic way: by reading
them. These simple search engines would crawl the Web and index
all the words on those sites, then compare that index to a certain
magical number. If your site used the right words the right
number of times, you had a pretty good chance of ranking highly for
those words.

Guess what happened? An entire wave of "content factories"
cropped up overnight, advertising bulk page production with something called "optimal keyword
density." Did you want to rank higher for the phrase “best
whirlpool dishwashers”? Get someone to write a few hundred
pages using that exact phrase really often. Bingo: number one
ranking. It hardly mattered if the pages were interesting, or
well-written, or frankly even legible. The first search
algorithms were looking at keyword frequency and nothing else.
And the content factories had their number — literally.

What followed was predictable: spam content began filling every
corner of the Web, clogging the search engines with hundreds of
thousands of articles that were clearly written for computers instead
of human beings. It became increasingly difficult to find
substantive content.

Google's Big Idea

Then Google came along with a better idea: instead of ranking sites by
the number of times they used a given phrase, why not rank sites by the
number of people who linked
to them instead? After all, human beings are
not as easily fooled as search bots, so presumably all those links
implied genuine thought and judgment. Google's big idea was to
treat the Web like a popularity contest, based on the notion that
people only link to sites that are relevant or
interesting. It was one of the first examples of so-called
“crowd-sourcing” — relying on the wisdom of the masses to solve a
complicated problem.

It worked: Google quickly became known as the most
relevant search engine on the Web. Their revolutionary idea
solved the problem of keyword stuffing in one fell swoop, and wiped out
an entire industry overnight.

Since that time, Google’s algorithm has evolved considerably to sniff out "illegal" links, but this
basic idea — that links are the best indicators of relevance — is
today written into the DNA of all three big search engines.

So links matter. A lot. In fact, the quantity and quality
of your inbound links is by far the biggest factor in determining your
site’s search rankings. The more links you earn from other sites,
and the more links you earn from RESPECTED sites, the higher your site
will rank across the board.